The Tale

(1917)

Outside the large single window the crepuscular light was dying out
slowly in a great square gleam without colour, framed rigidly in the
gathering shades of the room.

It was a long room. The irresistible tide of the night ran into the most
distant part of it, where the whispering of a man's voice, passionately
interrupted and passionately renewed, seemed to plead against the
answering murmurs of infinite sadness.

At last no answering murmur came. His movement when he rose slowly from
his knees by the side of the deep, shadowy couch holding the shadowy
suggestion of a reclining woman revealed him tall under the low ceiling,
and sombre all over except for the crude discord of the white collar
under the shape of his head and the faint, minute spark of a brass
button here and there on his uniform.

He stood over her a moment, masculine and mysterious in his immobility,
before he sat down on a chair near by. He could see only the faint oval
of her upturned face and, extended on her black dress, her pale hands, a
moment before abandoned to his kisses and now as if too weary to move.

He dared not make a sound, shrinking as a man would do from the prosaic
necessities of existence. As usual, it was the woman who had the
courage. Her voice was heard first--almost conventional while her being
vibrated yet with conflicting emotions.

"Tell me something," she said.

The darkness hid his surprise and then his smile. Had he not just said
to her everything worth saying in the world--and that not for the first
time!

"What am I to tell you?" he asked, in a voice creditably steady. He was
beginning to feel grateful to her for that something final in her tone
which had eased the strain.

"Why not tell me a tale?"

"A tale!" He was really amazed.

"Yes. Why not?"

These words came with a slight petulance, the hint of a loved woman's
capricious will, which is capricious only because it feels itself to to
be a law, embarrassing sometimes and always difficult to elude.

"Why not?" he repeated, with a slightly mocking accent, as though he had
been asked to give her the moon. But now he was feeling a little angry
with her for that feminine mobility that slips out of an emotion as
easily as out of a splendid gown.

He heard her say, a little unsteadily with a sort of fluttering
intonation which made him think suddenly of a butterfly's flight:

"You used to tell--your--your simple and--and professional--tales very
well at one time. Or well enough to interest me. You had a--a sort of
art--in the days--the days before the war."

"Really?" he said, with